Being someone who has only ever programmed in languages that use whitespace or parens, I really, really don't get the curly braces thing. :) White space is very readable and just as obvious a discernment of codeblocks as curly braces.
As someone who uses both constantly,
Whitespace languages and curly braces are the same.
For a good programmer, she can take out the curly brace and it should look like a whitespace language. Likewise, a whitespace language would just have braces inserted everywhere there would be an indent change. '{' for forward indent and '}' for backwards indent.
The problem with significant whitespace is that it makes routine tasks like copy & paste and shifting blocks around a tedious and error prone exercise instead of a trivial editor task. Give me instead a syntax that lets my editor completely and correctly reformat an entire file with a keypress.
Significant indentation is the #1 thing keeping me at a distance from Haskell and Coffeescript.
I find that significant white space is a problem mainly when going between editors, and also mainly because of space vs. tab problems. E.g. if I copy-paste from vim in Terminal into TextWrangler (free BBEdit) then all the tabs have become spaces, which python will throw a fit about. Similarly if I copy-paste code from a website or blog entry.
In languages with () or {} I can hit a key to reformat copy-pasted code. In Python I have to do it manually.
When it comes to moving blocks of Python code around inside one source file, then it's a simple matter to hit the plus/minus indent hotkey.
Using tabs instead of spaces is not a recommended practice for Python, or most white space orientated languages that I'm aware of. Adopting that best-practice would seem to alleviate most of your concerns that you've listed here.
Most editors even let you handle that on a filetype basis, so you can use 4 spaces for Python, and tabs for your C files.
>Why should I even waste my time worrying about supplying spaces or tabs every time I go to a new line while programming.
What are you talking about? Why wouldn't you have your editor just insert the correct number of spaces when you press the tab key? It's worked fine for all my python work.
Anyway, that's tab vs. space flamewar, best practices flame war, etc.
Long story short, I don't like spaces because editors do not make it as easy to navigate back/forward 4 (or 2) spaces as it is to navigate 1 tab. Most annoying instance of this: what combination of keypresses does it take to get from the middle of a line to the beginning of a line? In Notepad++ it's easy, but it Xcode its cmd-left-arrow then hit right-arrow for every space/tab you need to pass. (Or in general for a Mac text editor cmd-left-arrow, then opt-right arrow, then opt-left arrow, but that doesn't always work right. In TextWrangler it's cmd-left + opt-right, which is better but still slightly tricky hopping from cmd to opt key.)
And now I'll introduce the editor flamewar: in vim, moving from anywhere on a line to the first non-whitespace character on that line is just ^, moving to the very first character of the line is 0. In general, navigation in vim is whitespace agnostic (inasmuch as you move around by chunks of text, not character by character)
I worked at a company a few years ago that experienced a site-wide website outage because an engineer hotfixed a python file with an editor that inserted a tab instead of a space. It wasn't easy to pinpoint the problem either.
Well, I dunno, I've never really had issues with it but, like I say, vast majority of my code has been in Python and Clojure. I'm not arguing against braces, btw, it's just another delimiter like whitespace. It's all just about what kinds of things you're willing to train your brain to do, IMO.
IMvHO: Curly braces are like punctuation marks in a language, in that they very clearly mark the beginning, end and so and so forth.
But, yes, it is a very style issue, but to me code without curly braces feels very naked.
